An Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) is an emergency responder trained to provide medical services to the ill and injured. Once thought of as an “ambulance driver or attendant,” the modern EMT performs many more duties than in the past, and responds to many types of emergency calls, including medical emergencies, hazardous materials exposure, mass casualty/triage events, childbirth, patient transport, fires, rescues, injuries, trauma and other types of calls. EMTs may be part of an Emergency Medical Service (EMS), hospital-based EMS, fire department, or independent response team.
EMTs are trained in practical emergency medicine and skills that can be deployed within a rapid time frame. In general, EMT intervention aims to expedite the safe and timely transport of a subject (e.g., to a hospital for definitive medical care, or from one location to another).
EMTs generally utilize ambulance cots to transport subjects. Ambulance cots typically comprise a generally rectangular patient support frame (e.g., supporting a patient litter) located above a generally rectangular wheeled base frame, as well as one or more collapsible assemblies. Various ambulance cots are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,097,941 to Merkel, 4,192,541 to Ferneau, 4,767,148 to Ferneau and Dunn, 5,537,700 to Way et al., and 5,575,026 to Way et al.
However, each one of these references suffers from one or more of the following disadvantages: they utilize a raising, lowering and/or height locking mechanism that allows an inadvertent, uncontrolled and rapid dropping of the patient litter (“hot dropping”); they lack means to assist a user of the cot to control cot speed (e.g., while descending a sloped surface); and/or they lack grab areas for a team of EMTs to distribute (e.g., equally) the weight of the cot (e.g., supporting the weight of a subject transported thereon) among each member of the team without exposing the members to dangerous pinch points (e.g., in which an EMT may pinch, cut and/or break fingers, hands, etc.). Thus, using a cot disclosed in the above identified references has in turn led to injuries to subjects transported on cots as well as to injuries to EMTs and other users of cots (e.g., musculoskeletal injuries) as a result of poor control of the cot (e.g., overexertion lifting and/or straining to raise/lower a subject and/or to regain control of a wayward cot).